Project description
Mobile transmitters have highly constrained output characteristics in terms of transmit power and linearity. The spectrum of the output signal must conform to speciﬁed spectral masks to omit leakage to adjacent channels. The nonlinear behavior of transmitter components such as the power ampliﬁer (PA) degrades the linearity of the system and increases the adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR). While digital pre-distortion of internal nonlinearities are well studied in literature, there are, to our best knowledge, no investigations to compensate effects of external sources by using digital algorithms in literature. This project focuses on digital compensation techniques of power supply distortions for a Switched-Capacitor Power Amplifier (SCPA). The SCPA is a configurable capacitive voltage divider, which combines the functionality of a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), a mixer, and a power amplifier (PA). The supply voltage of the SCPA can be seen as its reference voltage. Hence, variations on the supply cause additional mixing products with the input signal of the SCPA and create unwanted distortions in its output, degrading the linearity of the SCPA. Currently, additional circuitry (LDO) is used to suppress the supply variations, decreasing the efficiency of the system and increasing the bill of materials. This work investigates digital pre-distortion techniques to compensate the introduced distortions by the supply voltage variations to omit additional circuitry and thus increase the efﬁciency of the system while simultaneously maintaining the linearity of the SCPA.